Thursday, 21 September 2017

Yes. Enough to offset the debt consequences of the cuts? Probably not:

Republicans are right about the existence of growth effects, but they are fooling themselves about the scale of those effects. There is nothing wrong in principle with “dynamic scoring,” the Republican-favored policy of incorporating growth effects into the Congressional Budget Office’s evaluation of the fiscal effects of legislation. But that should be done responsibly. The current pie-in-the-sky Republican attitude toward taxes is something else entirely. On the other hand, there’s a good conservative case for ignoring dynamic scoring, too: If we cut a dollar in spending for every dollar in tax cuts and find out 20 years from now that we could have gotten away with only cutting 70 cents in spending on the dollar, then that will be a happy surprise. Sobriety in expectations and caution about future developments was, once upon a time, considered “conservative.”

There are many things that Congress should be doing to improve our national economic performance. Blindly hacking away at the tax code with a meat ax isn’t one of them.

Wednesday, 20 September 2017

The Washington Post has an interesting and disturbing piece about a Swedish man who went undercover into the swamps of the alt-right. They’re a despicable lot, but the Post seems unable to admit they have some despicable opponents:

In Charlottesville, he marched alongside hundreds of young neo-Nazis and white supremacists before he was sprayed with Mace by a counterprotester and witnessed the car attack that killed Heather Heyer.

How about:

In Charlottesville, he marched peacefully alongside hundreds of young neo-Nazis and white supremacists before he was assaulted by a neo-Marxist and witnessed the car attack that killed Heather Heyer.

America has two fringe groups we need to eliminate. Let’s hear about both of them.

Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, has one thing right: The latest Republican bill on health care is not a repeal and replacement of Obamacare. Under it, the Affordable Care Act’s taxes, spending, and regulation would mostly remain in place. Of course, previous Republican bills left a lot of Obamacare in place, too. For many months it has been clear that Republicans do not have the votes for a true replacement.

Where Paul is wrong is in opposing the Graham-Cassidy bill on that basis. A true replacement of Obamacare would be better than Graham-Cassidy, but Graham-Cassidy is still much better than Obamacare. It abolishes the individual and employer mandates, caps per capita spending on Medicaid, blocks federal funds from going to insurance plans that cover abortion, and lets interested states attain freedom from some of Obamacare’s regulations. Some of those states could use that freedom to create markets in which people outside of Medicare, Medicaid, and employer-based coverage would finally be enabled to buy cheap, renewable catastrophic-insurance policies.

The senator’s objections to the bill amount to a case for improving it, perhaps in a conference committee after it passes the Senate. They do not amount to a case for voting it down. The bill goes farther in the right direction than the “skinny repeal” bill for which Paul voted earlier this summer. That bill abolished only the individual and employer mandates.

National Review has elsewhere documented more of Paul’s gyrations on Obamacare, sometimes supporting repeal alone, sometimes demanding repeal-and-replace, and identified a common thread: He’ll publicly oppose any repeal measure which might pass and support any which can’t. Why? His national constituency of libertarians demands repeal, his Kentucky constituency (46th in state income) can’t afford it.

UPDATE: The Weekly Standard is a little more explicit on Paul’s “puzzling” behavior:

Given his past comments and voting history, Paul seems more opposed to the particular way Graham-Cassidy distributes the block grants and not the overall amount of Obamacare spending it retains or the mere principle of block-granting Obamacare’s spending.

“It takes money from the Democrat states and gives it to the Republican states,” Paul said on Monday. Because the bill redistributes all of Obamacare’s spending nationwide, states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare like California and New York would get less than they would under the Obamacare status quo, but non-expansion states like Virginia and Wisconsin would get more. Paul’s Kentucky expanded Medicaid.

Tuesday, 19 September 2017

A group of prominent scientists on Monday created a potential whiplash moment for climate policy, suggesting that humanity could have considerably more time than previously thought to avoid a “dangerous” level of global warming.

This is a whiplash only for the people who believed the extreme crap in the first place.

A fifth of undergrads now say it’s acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes “offensive and hurtful statements.”

That’s one finding from a disturbing new survey of students conducted by John Villasenor, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and University of California at Los Angeles professor.

[...]

[W]hen students were asked whether the First Amendment protects “hate speech,” 4 in 10 said no. This is, of course, incorrect. Speech promoting hatred — or at least, speech perceived as promoting hatred — may be abhorrent, but it is nonetheless constitutionally protected.

[...]

Students were asked whether the First Amendment requires that an offensive speaker at a public university be matched with one with an opposing view. Here, 6 in 10 (mistakenly) said that, yes, the First Amendment requires balance.

The most chilling findings, however, involved how students think repugnant speech should be dealt with.

Villasenor offered a hypothetical that may sound familiar to those who recall recent fracases at California State University at Los Angeles, Middlebury College , Claremont McKenna College and other institutions:

Let’s say a public university hosts a “very controversial speaker,” one “known for making offensive and hurtful statements.” Would it be acceptable for a student group to disrupt the speech “by loudly and repeatedly shouting so that the audience cannot hear the speaker”?

Astonishingly, half said that snuffing out upsetting speech — rather than, presumably, rebutting or even ignoring it — would be appropriate. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to find this response acceptable (62 percent to 39 percent), and men were more likely than women (57 percent to 47 percent). Even so, sizable shares of all groups agreed.

It gets even worse.

Respondents were also asked if it would be acceptable for a student group to use violence to prevent that same controversial speaker from talking. Here, 19 percent said yes.